The Guardian: Guardian special6

Monday 10 December 2007

Guardian extra p2

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, went all John Lennon recently when he delivered his vision of music industry nirvana. "Imagine a world," he wrote, "where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players."

The legal action for copyright infringement taken by Prince against three unofficial fan websites highlights the awkward position in which internet service providers (ISPs) find themselves under the current legislation. Is it best for them to accept liability for content as a fair cop, or can they get away with claiming "it wasn't me guv"?

For Justine Roberts, founder of the Mumsnet social networking website, a stressful year-long defamation battle with child care guru Gina Ford over comments posted on Mumsnet's bulletin board has prompted her to campaign for the libel law to be up-dated. "Put simply," she says, "libel law has not caught up with the digital age."

Guardian extra p3

Social network sites know who you are, who you know and what you're interested in. They know what you like to buy and where you live. If they are taken at face value, their extraordinary popularity suggests we're comfortable with our personal data being so freely available. But there lies the rub.

Guardian extra p4

Google's quest - to digitise hundreds of thousands of books - shows no sign of let-up. While in the UK this may be confined to books which are out of copyright, the major publishing houses have jumped on the new media bandwagon, opting to create digital repositories of all their works. This is the climate in which today's writer works - but is it cause for celebration or a case of author beware?

Guardian extra p5

The actor Chris Langham, fresh from three months' imprisonment following his conviction for downloading child pornography, has given media interviews repeating his courtroom insistence that he looked at the images in an attempt to understand his own experiences as a childhood victim of sexual abuse. There are many whose curiosity, regardless of its prompt, would stop at such an unpalatable border (indeed, the Court of Appeal described Langham's explanation as "highly improbable"). But there is a class of person whose curiosity - for conventional sexual imagery, at least - is natural: teenagers.

Guardian extra p6

The vast sums generated by rakes and entry fees for online poker games have often been cited as a disincentive to corruption. Insiders at the behemoths of the poker world are making so much money legitimately, says this line of analysis, that they've no reason to cheat. The recent controversy involving one of the world's biggest operators, absolutepoker.com, turned that analysis on its head - and cast into sharp relief the available means of legal redress in this most nascent of digital arenas.

Will Amy Winehouse go to rehab? You might have a view and, if you want to put your money where your mouth is, you can. Celebrity waywardness has created a booming UK market in betting on events such as Winehouse actually going to rehab (11-8 on), or the next member of the royal family to become involved in a sex or drug scandal. But does anything go? Or are there legal limits on what you can bet on?

Guardian extra p7

The good news is that, according to the Mobile Data Association, 4,825bn text messages were sent during September 2007. That's an average of just over 1.2bn messages per week, 173m per day, and 4,000 messages per second. Nice work, if you're a network provider, and lots of fun for our textual nation. The bad news is that a text message is as pregnant with the potential for legal liability as other forms of "traditional" communication.

Since 1989, the legislative cornerstone of the European Union's audiovisual policy has been the Television Without Frontiers directive. The directive enshrined the principle of free movement of European TV programmes within the internal market and set minimum standards in areas such as the protection of minors and advertising. This was all well and good, and, better still, it worked.